Welcome, race fans

Throughout the South — or anywhere that holds a NASCAR race — you’ll see signs that say “Welcome, race fans” pop up with ubiquity. So it would be interesting to see if there’s a crop of “Welcome, Ubunteros” signs cropping up in Oakland for the Ubuntu Developers Summit, which starts today.

Have fun, guys and gals.

I won’t be there. I can hear the collective sigh of relief. Since I’m the Emannuel Goldstein of the Ubuntu/Canonical set, they’re just going to have to broadcast my picture during their three-minutes-of-hate session and leave it at that.

Rather than attend an event designed to line Mark Shuttleworth’s pockets with “coin” (pronounced kwan), I think I’ll do something more constructive. I’m teaching a class — it’s sort of a rolling head start into the next school year — on Python to homeschooled middle schoolers/high schoolers at my daughter’s base school. Using “Snake Wrangling for Kids,” we’ll get started on making some FOSS developers, hopefully, out of some of the students here.

So, benefit one or benefit all?

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides true FOSS solutions — which no longer includes Canonical/Ubuntu products — in the small business and home office environment.)

We can but hope the Ubunties have a fruitful event
and issues are resolved.

Paul Sams

May 7, 2012 at 7:25 pm

I had been asleep and did a double take at your blog. I couldn’t really see a “tree hugger” being a NASCAR fan. No offense intended, you just don’t strike me as the type. I live in Lincoln, AL using a distro made by a fellow in Lincoln, England and have seen “Welcome Race Fans” for two weeks. I didn’t go to the race either, the track is about 5 miles from my house. Out here in the sticks there is no “Church of Ubuntu” and no Utemples either!
Paul Sams

Hey, Paul — I grew up in Florida and went to Daytona twice a year — for the Daytona 500 and the Firecracker 400 — for a better part of my childhood. So I’m well familiar with the “Welcome Race Fans” banners🙂 I have to admit that NASCAR is one of my guilty pleasures. But, yeah, it’s a bit uncharacteristic.

Paul Sams

May 7, 2012 at 9:50 pm

My apologies! You can’t trust stereotypes! When I would read Ken Starks and then read you I laughed hard about how you each sort of poked fun at your differences of opinion(s).
Now if we Linux users could convince our fellow Americans to disagree but work together for solutions, we all have more in common than we realize. Your previous post about about Mark S made me think the true innovators are folks like Warren Woodford who made Debian easy for people like me back in 2004, and Phillip Newborough who made openbox easy for folks like me. Growing up in Florida you are probably able to translate redneck, especially if you spent a lot of time in the panhandle! I used to like Ubuntu with the exception of it choice of default themes, but I think Ubuntu has forgotten where it started from.
Paul Sams